Advertisement

Advertisement

Forum : Testing the gender gap – Kurt Kleiner takes a look at how the US attempts to sort out its
brightest students

THIS autumn more than a million American high school students aged between 16
and 17, sharpened pencils in hand, sat down for two hours in classrooms all over
the US and took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT). A rite of
passage for college-bound students, the test is an important mock test for a
later standardised exam, and also allows high scorers to qualify for a
prestigious scholarship.

But the PSAT and its older sibling, the SAT, are accused of discriminating
against girls. Most of the high scorers are boys, and they receive most of the
scholarships. The difference is largely due to girls’ relatively poorer
performance on the maths portion of the multiple-choice exam.

Critics claim the fault is not in girls’ maths ability, but in the test. In a
victory for critics, the US Department of Education last month reached an
agreement with test makers to change the test. Next year the test will include
an additional section on correct usage of written English, which is expected to
help boost girls’ overall scores.

Instantly at stake is a chance to “share” in some of the &dollar;27 million
that will be given out to some 7000 National Merit Scholars, based in part on
their PSAT scores. Because of their lower test scores, only 40 per cent of the
semi finalists are girls.

Advertisement

Also at stake is the legitimacy of the college admissions process. The US
school system does not administer a national standardised exam equivalent to
Britain’s A levels. Most universities use the SAT or a similar standardised test
to help them choose applicants.

The test-makers refuse to admit there is a problem with their tests. “At
Educational Testing Service [EST] we think the gender gap between the sexes is
deplorable . . . But the important thing is that the test is not the source of
the difference. It is uncovering a difference that already exists,” says
Mercedes Morris Garcia, a spokeswoman for ETS.

Maybe. But in the surprisingly sorry history of intelligence testing, that
claim has been made many times. In the 1920s and 1930s in the US some of the
first intelligence tests seemed to show that recent immigrants from Eastern and
Southern European countries were less intelligent than the longer established
Northern Europeans. The test-makers at the time insisted the differences were
real, and not some failing of the test. Today, the claim is recognised as
nonsense, and the American offspring of all those Italians and Poles are doing
just fine.

The ETS does not, by the way, claim that the SAT tests for some sort of
innate intelligence. It makes the much more modest claim that the SAT merely
predicts how well the student will do in college. But the problem is that girls
actually do slightly better than boys in their first year in college, despite
their lower SAT scores.

ETS’s explanation is that studies show girls take different courses from
boys, floating easily through classes in the arts and humanities while their
hairier counterparts struggle manfully with maths and science.

But another study, also conducted by the ETS and published in the Harvard
Educational Review in 1992, came to an opposite conclusion. That study
found that even among men and women taking the same courses and receiving the
same grades, the women had scored lower on their SATs than the men.

Howard Everson, chief research scientist for the College Board (a group of
colleges that oversees the ETS), says a later examination of the data showed
part of the discrepancy was down to course selection—the difference
between maths for poets and maths for engineers. But not all of it could be
explained away.

The best guess is that the difference has to do with social factors beyond
the scope of the test. For example, girls might be more conscientious about
delivering their homework on time. But even if that is true, a test designed to
predict college performance would ideally take those important factors into
account.

Besides, Fair Test, a pressure group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has
its own ideas about why the test underpredicts female performance. Some studies
have shown, for instance, that girls aren’t as good at multiple-choice exams as
boys. Boys are more willing to guess at a problem they are unsure of and move on
to the next one; girls are more likely to puzzle the tough questions out—a
bad strategy for a multiple-choice test where time is tight.

Given that, it’s good that ETS is experimenting with changes in the way the
test is administered which could help equalise the scores of girls and boys in
the long run—for example, allowing constructed responses such as
fill-in-the-blanks answers that can still be efficiently graded by machine.

It’s also worth noting that the gender bias once cut the other way. When the
first intelligence tests were being developed the test-makers were puzzled to
see girls doing much better than boys, since the tests rewarded verbal skill.
That didn’t last long. Test-makers simply added maths questions until the boys’
scores came up. After all, girls couldn’t be smarter than boys.